We propose a novel method to synthesize geometric models from a given class of context-aware structured shapes such as buildings and other man-made objects. Our central idea is to leverage powerful machine learning methods from the area of natural language processing for this task. To this end, we propose a technique that maps shapes to strings and vice versa, through an intermediate shape graph representation. We then convert procedurally generated shape repositories into text databases that in turn can be used to train a variational autoencoder which enables higher level shape manipulation and synthesis like, e.g., interpolation and sampling via its continuous latent space.